Hello All,

I am in need of some advice...

I have recently joined a small company that has 7 Linux Servers and 4 Windows 2000 servers that have a total of 250GB of data.

Currently we have no backup what so ever, So we are in need of a good backup system that is also cheap and can be quickly restored.

What we dont want to do is spend $1000's on 11 tape drives and tapes and the whole nine yards. We have a budget of about $1200 to do daily backups of these 11 servers.

Any ideas?

Thanks for any help you can provide, This fourm has been a real life saver for me and my company.

- Ryan

As for software, If you will be designating a Linux box as the backup server, I would go with tar/smbtar scripts, using cron to schedule the backups. If a Windows2000 box will be doing it, I would use the native backup utility and make smb shares on the Linux servers that you want to backup. Either way should work fine. As for hardware I would go with HDD's if you want cheap and quick. Newegg has 300GB 5400RPM drives for $250, which will outperform almost any tape drive. If you feel tapes are the answer you could check ebay for a Drive and library setup. I got one a while back for around $40.

Thomas

I have a spare disk on a linux server to which I rsync all other data areas (local + remote windows machines). I publish the backup area read-only so users can get to a backup copy of their data themselves if need be.

For off-site you'll probably need a tape drive unless you can get some large removable drives.

You also need to consider how you are going to reinstall your operating systems, applications, users etc. in case the servers get stolen or completely destroyed.

Finally you need to test your backup strategy once you've implemented it - if tape based make sure you can you read your backup tapes on a different drive.

$1200 for a budget? Ouch.

At one client site, I put in a backup system that is disk-based using rsnapshot, which is based on rsync. Slick stuff. www.rsnapshot.org.

What they do is swap drives out of a firewire (IEEE1394)-connected hard drive case, then the rsnapshot process runs on a daily basis.

You don't mention authentication, nor what your Windows servers are doing. AD?

Jon J.